Happy Chikungunya Year 

While Chikungunya has been appearing in the news often during Fall 2014 because of the numerous cases in the US, it gained increasing popularity in the beginning of the new year because Lindsay Lohan contracted the disease in French Polynesia and used social media to inform her fans of this fact. It seems that nowadays, a virus’ claim to fame is through the world of entertainment. An advice to viruses that want to be made known worldwide is to infect a celebrity who has millions of Instagram followers. Lohan herself has 2.5 million followers. Numerous articles were written about Lohan’s infection, including an article in the celebrity section of New York Times. Lindsay Lohan posted empowering messages such as “I refuse to let a virus affect my peaceful vacation."

Many articles have been published about the virus recently because of the end of year assessments of its damage in the Americas, the Carribean.  Whereas previously Chikungunya infection was limited to Asia and Africa, the virus appeared for the first time in the Western Hemisphere in December 2013 when several cases were reported. In the year 2014, more than a million cases were reported in the Western Hemisphere and more than two thousand cases were recorded in the US. Many predict huge outbreaks in 2015 in Florida due to it being a state visited by many people from the Caribbean and Central America. Numerous have indicated that the virus has gained a toehold in the US foreshadowing a dim Chikungunya filled future.

By Mariam Kyarunts

http://time.com/3651313/lindsay-lohan-chikungunya-virus/

http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2015/01/01/374198141/painful-virus-sweeps-central-america-gains-a-toehold-in-u-s

UN Launches App #ISurvivedEbola 

UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency is working on the campaign called #ISurvivedEbola, which entails encouraging people in the three West African Ebola afflicted countries to share their experiences. The platform for the sharing is a mobile application, on which survivors are able to post videos, pictures, and testimonies about Ebola. Due to the generous funding of $100 million from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s foundation towards Ebola counteraction efforts, those working on the project are able to give smartphones to people in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia to give them the opportunity to share their Ebola stories. The aim of the campaign is to not just inform the viewers of the egregious experiences which those inflicted with Ebola have been through, but to elicit empathy by bringing Ebola to them through allowing them to experience it vicariously.

By Mariam 

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/isurvivedebola-un-launches-app-fight-virus-stigma-n279426

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/04/ebola-survivors-west-africa-mobile-app-stories-outbreak

Influenza now at epidemic levels

At the close of the year, the CDC reported that deaths due to influenza and pneumonia have reached epidemic levels in the U.S.  837 flu and pneumonia deaths were reported in the 2nd to last week of the year, or 6.8% - the epidemic threshold - of total deaths reported that week.  The states most heavily hit by the epidemic include Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, which collectively reported 151 deaths.  However, flu activity is widespread across the nation, with 36 states reporting high flu activity levels.

Luckily, in California, flu activity has only been reported as "sporadic", though 28 deaths were reported in Los Angeles alone.  Meanwhile, in San Francisco, 8 deaths were reported.  Like most flu seasons, the highest risk group are seniors and children under the age of 5, which saw hospitalization rates of 38.3 and 13.4 per 100,000, respectively, compared to the average of 9.7 per 100,000 Americans.  Most of these hospitalizations (~95%) are due to an H3N2 strain (A/Switzerland/9715293/2013) of influenza that is currently not protected against by this year's flu vaccination.  Still, those infected can be treated with antivirals such as Tamiflu and Relenza to decrease the severity of their illness.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-flu-season-epidemic-20141230-story.html

--Andrew Duong

New Position at the CDC: Lab Safety Chief

Due to several “safety lapses” with dangerous pathogens at the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the organizations’ administration has created a new safety chief position in November. As of January 1st, the position is still “under recruitment.” According to a CDC spokeswoman Barbara Reynolds, the CDC wants to recruit someone who is able to identify and solve the existing problems with the safety in the agency’s labs and design ways to make the labs for “accountable for follow-up.” This action was prompted by several events in the last year. On December 23, a technician was exposed to the Ebola virus when he was processing it, in March the CDC sent a deadly strain of avian flu to a U.S. Department of Agriculture Laboratory that was supposed to be inactivated, and in June the anthrax virus was “mishandled” causing exposure of more than 80 workers to the virus. These news have galvanized a lot of criticism towards the organization to which the nation looks up to for protecting us from the same pathogens that it’s failing to protect its workers from. The new lab safety chief will have the important role of not only improving the safety measures and expanding biosafety training, but also assuring the nation of CDC’s strength, stability, and reliability. Is hiring one person really enough to fulfill this task?

From my personal experience of working in a lab, I know that all it takes to get bio-safety training is to watch several video modules and pass a quiz on the Stanford Axess training site. The system has loopholes in that it allows the viewer to go to the end of the video without watching all of it and then guessing at the end. The answers to the questions often seem logical and even obvious, so one doesn’t need to be knowledgeable about the details of handling dangerous pathogens in order to pass the training. I don’t know how the lab workers are trained at the CDC to handle the pathogens, but these “safety lapses” in the CDC suggest that perhaps more drastic changes need to happen at the structural level. Perhaps the CDC’s hiring of a new safety chief serves as a distraction to the real problem at hand: the issue of many worker’s unpreparedness to deal with these pathogens and lack of attention paid to the potential for disaster.

~ Mariam Kyarunts

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-31/bungling-of-cdc-virus-samples-prompts-hiring-of-lab-safety-chief.html

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/12/31/us-health-ebola-usa-cdc-idUKKBN0K908E20141231

A Previously Unknown Virus Identified as Bourbon Virus in Kansas

It is an exciting time for infectious diseases experts in the United states, particularly for those in Kansas, due to the identification of a new virus! A microbe was discovered in Bourbon county, Kansas where it infected and killed a farmer last summer. After a meticulous process that lasted several months, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, identified it as a previously unknown virus and consequently named it the Bourbon virus. 

It’s classified under the genus Thogotovirus in the virus family Orthomyxoviridae. The virus acts fast: the infected man died after ten days of the infection. The man presented to the hospital with a symptoms that included high fever, muscle aches and loss of appetite and progressed to lung and kidney failure. Tests indicated that a high number of liver enzymes and a low number of platelets and white cells. Scientists ran tests for the Rocky Mountain spotted fever and the Heartland virus, but the test results were negative. The virus is thought to be transmitted by ticks or mosquitoes, but more research needs to be done to identify the exact route of transmission. Scientists at the CDC suspect that the virus has been around for some time and has infected others even though no other cases have been identified. Scientists have a lot of work cut out for them as they have to investigate potential previous infections by testing blood samples from people who had similar unidentifiable illnesses. 

Should we be worried about this? Right now the risk of infection is low due to the fact that ticks aren’t active in cold whether. However just to be safe, it’s important to use insect repellent when outdoors. Read the article below to learn more about the virus and stay tuned for more information during this exciting time of new virus identification!

Hope you ate many Bo(ur)-bon chocolates during the break!

Your Bourbonophobe,

Mariam

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/24/science/mysterious-virus-that-killed-a-farmer-in-kansas-is-identified.html?_r=0

Book Review: Polio An American Story

In high school, my biology class went on a field trip to the Salk Institute, just a 15 minute drive from my hometown of San Diego, CA.  At this point in my life, I knew Jonas Salk as the creator of the polio vaccine, but knew little else of him.  Moreover, I knew little about the polio virus itself, which is why I decided to read Polio, An American Story by David M. Oshinsky.

Polio: An American Story provides a compelling account of not only the history of polio in the United States, but also the major players that contributed to our knowledge of polio, and the powerful legacy they left behind. Through a close and detailed historical analysis, the book offers a rich trove of factual information, while still preserving an almost narrative feel to it by delving deep into the stories that surround the facts.

Although known today as a debilitating, but largely preventable virus, thanks in part to the efforts of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin who respectively invented the inactivated and live-attenuated polio vaccines, Polio: An American Story acknowledges that the path towards vaccination was long, arduous, and sometimes downright scandalous.  Oshinsky begins by depicting the historical context that allowed polio to come into the public consciousness.  Personal hygiene played little role in the lives of the average person at the turn of the 20th century; the majority of people neither used soap nor toothbrushes.  The advent of public health campaigns early in the 20th century dramatically changed this, paving the way for one of the largest public health campaigns to come into being when the Salk vaccine was tested in the 1950s.  Furthermore, the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a presumed victim of polio, played a huge part in raising awareness for polio.  Under his presidency, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, more commonly known as the March of Dimes, came into existence, dedicated to polio research.

Years of research - on how polio is transmitted, what that route of transmission is, and how many distinct strains of polio existed - finally resulted in an inactivated vaccine by Jonas Salk.  This vaccine however, was not without its doubters and its own scandals.  Notably, Albert Sabin, who was working on his own polio research at the time was vehemently opposed to the Salk vaccine, though his motives for doing so are questioned.  Despite his legacy of success today however, Salk is portrayed as a calculated and sometimes selfish researcher, who, though revered by the people, was not always highly respected among his peers.  The development of the Sabin vaccine - and the eventual recommendation that the Sabin vaccine replace the Salk vaccine due to its presumed higher effectiveness, continued the feud between Sabin and Salk even to their deathbed.

In all, Oshinky depicts a vivid landscape of polio research in the early-to-mid 1900s that draws on the many forgotten stories that led to the development of the polio vaccine.  Although perhaps warranted, the end seems to be a race to the finish, with much less detail on the history of polio in the United States following the advent of vaccination.  As a whole however, Polio: An American Story provides a thought-provoking, detailed, and insightful account of the history of polio in the United States that marries together story and fact into one fascinating read.

--Andrew Duong

Johan Hultin

Remember him? He’s the pathologist who discovered tissues containing the 1918 influenza virus, which allowed the virus to be sequenced for the first time. Bob talked about him a bit in class, but Johan Hultin’s story is so darn cool I thought I’d look into it a little bit more.

Hultin was taking a break from Swedish medical school and studying microbiology at the University of Iowa and a professor happened to make a passing remark that intact samples from the 1918 flu still exited in frozen in bodies in the Artic. Hultin was looking for a dissertation topic and proposed that he try to find the virus so it could be used to make a vaccine. (I’m not sure the logic of trying to use an old strain to make a vaccine against a new strain, but maybe this was before some newfangled techniques and it was the best they could do.)

In any case, in native groups in the Alaska, death rates from this outbreak virtually wiped out small villages. Johan Hultin’s enthusiasm was probably fueled by the fact that he spent a summer in Alaska with a paleontologist and believed that driving up the newly opened Alaska Highway, “was itself a great adventure.”

 In order to establish where the mass graves were, he wrote to a few missionaries. They sent him copies of record books in Norwegian. Being Swedish, he luckily happened to be able to read Norwegian.

Off Johan went to Alaska, to a village now called Brevig Mission, to be specific. The villagers let him excavate. Once he got the samples, he had to quickly get them into the lab. A storm made the bay almost impassable and dry ice brought to refrigerate the samples had evaporated. Johan and his small team used carbon dioxide from a fire extinguisher to make dry ice and with local help, they managed to find an overland route.

Despite this extraordinary effort, Johan’s first attempt was unsuccessful. He concluded that there was no live virus in the corpses. He planned to write about the failed attempt for his thesis, but he was accepted into the medical school at the University of Iowa and never ended up writing it.

It turns out that the Army was also trying to get the Spanish flu out of the ice, but found only skeletons in their original excavation site. Tauenberger, the civilian scientists who heads the microbiology division of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, wondered whether it’d be possible to get the Spanish flu out.  He was able piece together a gene called NS from 78 soldiers and published a report. Hultin happened to read the report and offered to bring Tauenberger frozen samples from Alaska with the flu.

Hultin returned to Brevig Mission. The local people were worried about releasing bad spirits and were relucantat to allow him to dig. Eventually, someone recalled that they had been given Christian burials, which was supposed to have sufficiently driven the bad spirits away, so they gave Hultin the go ahead.

Hultin and his crew found a body he had missed the first time, a fat woman in her thirties. The fat apparently helped insulate her body from the brief thaws. In fact, the material that Hultin brought back was more fragmented than the Tauenberger’s soldiers. However, Hultin gave him all the material he needed and the virus was sequenced 8 years later.

References:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/09/AR2005100900932.html